


no one ever said it would be this hard

by bisexualharrycunningham



Category: Silent Witness (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon Divergence, Friendship, Hopeful Ending, I just had some feelings and wanted them to exist outside of my head, Multi, Other, Romantic Friendship, Set after Harry leaves in s15, bring Harry back 2k21, he misses them more than he thought he would bc he's a babie, just exploring Harry's feelings about the other two, kinda????, lemme know if yall can't read it pls, me projecting my feelings about a character onto said character? never, probably needs some editing but we move, the formatting keeps coming up weird on my laptop but not on my phone so idk what that's about
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-11
Updated: 2021-01-11
Packaged: 2021-03-16 03:26:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28699884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bisexualharrycunningham/pseuds/bisexualharrycunningham
Summary: Harry is in New York, drinking alone in his flat, and he's thinking about Leo and Nikki and how much he bloody misses them.
Relationships: (implications of) - Relationship, Harry Cunningham/Leo Dalton, Nikki Alexander/Harry Cunningham
Kudos: 1





	no one ever said it would be this hard

**Author's Note:**

> yes, the title is taken from coldplay's the scientist... i don't even like coldplay but it's a harry/nikki classic and i'm feeling emotional about them, and therefore listened to it on repeat while i wrote this jsjsjjsskks

Harry stared into his glass, swirling the dregs of his beer around absently, eyes unfocused. It was late, and he was working early the next morning, but something inside him felt  _ heavy;  _ he couldn’t push himself up from the armchair, couldn’t lift his sad feet to walk that sad walk to his sad empty room in his sad new flat with the stunning view of his new city that made him so, so stupidly sad. His new American, friendless city. No, he couldn’t move – he just stared, into his glass, lit, since the sun had set, by the light pollution of the thriving nightlife below, stared and stared and wondered why he felt like crying but couldn’t, not quite. But there was a lump in his throat and it had been lodged there since he’d left London. 

He had been so excited for this new job. A new place, new people, new opportunities... a new Harry. Except this new Harry was just a shell of the former Harry, not better, not different, just a toned-down, greyscale Harry. He’d always loved travelling, had wanted to live abroad for years, but it didn’t feel as freeing as he thought it would...

Was it because of, well, past experiences? He thought about that a lot, wondered whether everything that had happened with Anna had tainted his outlook on the world, and concluded that yes, it maybe did, a little. But he felt lonely, abandoned, even though he had been, for want of a better word, the abandon-er. And that was nothing to do with Anna, not really – it was to do with the two people who had helped him through that whole horror, who had stood by him and believed in him unwaveringly when the rest of the world was reluctant to see him as anything other than a cold-blooded killer, who he’d left behind without a second thought and had somehow broken his heart over. 

Leo and Nikki.

Nikki and Leo.

Their names swam around his head. Harry gripped the glass tighter. 

The first few weeks had been fine; Nikki had text him every few days, texts dotted with Lyell Centre anecdotes and smiley faces. Leo had called a handful of times, and emailed once (slightly drunkenly, Harry suspected)  telling Harry how missed he was. But he’d been in the US for four months now, and that initial contact was dwindling away to nothing, and he felt childishly hurt, and left out, and maybe even jealous, especially since Nikki’s latest text, a few weeks back now, was brimming with enthusiasm for some “Jack”, who both herself and Leo seemed to have fallen utterly head over heels for. He hated to think that he’d been replaced so easily, that they’d somehow already moved on, while he was still spending every bloody evening drinking alone in his flat, thinking about their stupid lovely faces and how much he wanted to just  _ hug  _ them both.  _ Pathetic,  _ he thought.  _ You’re a grown man, Cunningham. Snap out of it. _

A colleague of his, Sarah, had tried to talk him out of his moodiness, lightly commenting that it was him that had made the choice to leave London, which of course he  _ knew,  _ and then, seeing his pained expression at her words, suggesting that maybe this forced ‘onwards and upwards’ attitude displayed by Nikki and Leo alike was simply their way of coping with missing him. It was logical, he knew that his colleagues were inclined to repress certain feelings, yet paranoia still wormed its way inside him, when he wasn’t wrist deep in a corpse’s chest or teaching to a hall of bored twenty-somethings, and he found himself wondering whether he had been delusional to believe that he ever meant anything to either of them, outside of work and what was expected of the team dynamic.

And what did he want to mean to them? 

When he’d first met Leo, he’d looked up to him in the way that schoolboys with crushes on their pretty teachers do; as the years went on, that infatuation ebbed away to more manageable fondness on a personal level to make way for a more professional admiration. With Nikki, there had been a sexual spark straight away, and he knew that they’d both felt it, even if it never went further than a one-off kiss that he’d found himself mentally replaying like a fool these past few weeks. But really, these distinctions and nuances to their relationships didn’t seem to matter now, Harry realised – because he felt like they were slipping away from him entirely, and if he wasn’t careful, he wouldn’t mean anything to either of them at all, friendship or relationship or anything in between or beyond.

The lump in his throat throbbed, and felt bigger than before. With a wince, Harry reached for the glass bottle on the nearby coffee table, and poured the remnants into his glass. They were his people, Leo and Nikki, Nikki and Leo, and he was an absolute  _ idiot  _ to ever think that he’d be able to live his life without the two of them to  snark at and buy morning coffee for. He bit back a laugh, bitter in his mouth as he was hit by the startling thought that  _ God _ , they were his soulmates, the people he was supposed to be with in whatever way he could, and he’d left them,  _ willingly  _ left them...

Well, he couldn’t go back now. Not with the bullshit he’d said about this being the “opportunity of a lifetime” and the “happiest he’d ever been”, not with the way he’d just upped and left without thinking about their true feelings behind their smiles and earnest congratulations. He couldn’t hurt them, or hurt himself, like that, not until he’d tried to a heal a little first. 

But one day? Harry swigged down the last of his beer, considering it. He tried to picture their reunion – would they be angry, happy, or simply not care? Which was better, which was worse, and what did he deserve, really? Would he ever have the guts to just rock up to see them, to say what he should’ve said, to do what he should’ve done?

_ Yeah _ , he thought.  His glass was empty. He set it down, sighed, and gradually felt himself be lulled into an exhausted sleep in his lonely little chair, as the neon lights of New York flickered before him. _Maybe one day I will._


End file.
